Hugh Trevor-Roper

This Project is now complete

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, who became a life peer as Lord Dacre of Glanton in 1989, was born on 15 January 1914. The son of a country doctor in Northumberland, he was educated at Charterhouse and then at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read first for a degree in Classics and then for one in History. He became a Research Fellow of Merton College Oxford in 1938. During the second World War he was an intelligence officer. In 1946 he returned to Christ Church as a Student, where he remained until 1957 when he became Regius Professor of Modern History, a post he held until 1980. From 1980 to 1987 he was Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He died on 26 January 2003.

His books were The Last Days of Hitler (1947); Historical Essays (1957);Religion, The Reformation and Social Change (1967); The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1970); Princes and Artists(1976); A Hidden Life (1976; also published as The Hermit of Peking);Renaissance Essays (1985); Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (1987); From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (1987). Five books have appeared posthumously: Letters from Oxford(2006); Europe’s Physician. The Various Life of Sir Theodore Mayerne (2006); The Invention of Scotland (2008);History and the Enlightenment (2010); and The Wartime Journals (2012).

The Dacre Trust, which has provided these web pages, was established by the late Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford (1957-1980). It is an educational charity, concerned primarily with the promotion of historical and classical studies in Oxford University.

Until recently the Trust allocated the bulk of its funds to the support of tutorial teaching in the three Oxford colleges with which he was associated, Christ Church where he was an undergraduate and don, Merton where he was a Research Fellow, and Oriel to which the Regius Chair was and is attached.

Since 2012 the Trust has been financing a Postgraduate Scholarship at Oxford in association with Somerville College. From 2014, in association with New College, it will be funding another Postgraduate Scholarship.

The Trust also pays for graduate or undergraduate prizes at Christ Church, Merton and Oriel colleges, and arranges annual Dacre Lectures in Oxford.

The large collection of the papers of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton, is held in the archive of Christ Church, Oxford. It contains documents relating to his career, research and publications, and extensive correspondence. The archivist is Judith Curthoys, who can be reached at archives@chch.ox.ac.uk. Permission to view the papers must be sought from Lord Dacre’s Literary Executor Blair Worden, who can be reached at blair.worden@history.ox.ac.uk. A number of files will not be open to readers for the near future.

The life of Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is by Richard Davenport-Hines. The memoir by Blair Worden is reproduced from Proceedings of the British Academy vol. 150: ‘Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, VI’ (2008). Adam Sisman’s Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Biography, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2010.

Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Biography. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2010, paperback 2011. Published in the United States by Random House as An Honourable Englishman. The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper (2011)

This list of Trevor-Roper’s writings, arranged by the year of composition and accompanied by an index, has been compiled by Richard Foster of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It does not pretend to be definitive or complete.

Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote much more than he published. Since his death in 2003 there have been five posthumous books by him:

Letters from Oxford. Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006; paperback 2007). The letters to Berenson cover the years 1947 to 1959. An appendix reproduces two letters on Oxford elections to Wallace Notestein.

Europe’s Physician. The Various Life of Sir Theodore Mayerne, edited by Blair Worden (Yale University Press, 2006). A study of the career of the Huguenot physician (1573-1655) and of its political and intellectual context.

The Invention of Scotland. Myth and History, edited by Jeremy J. Cater (Yale university Press, 2008; paperback 2009). A study of three myths in Scottish history: the political myth of the ‘ancient constitution’; the literary myth, which includes Ossian and Sir Walter Scott; and the sartorial myth of the tartan and the kilt.

History and the Enlightenment, edited by John Robertson (Yale university Press, 2010). A collection of essays which Trevor-Roper had planned to follow the three volumes of collected essays that he published in the later part of his life: Renaissance Essays; Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans; From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution.